How expensive is the mere existence of a node?

[fluury]

Godot Version

Godot 4.5.1

Question

Hi there!
In my 3D game, I have a rather massive amount of items you can collect. Each has a bunch of children that do their own stuff, like a particle system, a mesh to draw itself, etc.

Now, most of them are actually not being drawn at the same time. The game has a very close Far-Z-Plane. Additionally, I’ve made it so that nodes that aren’t within a certain radius both do not get processed (in terms of _process and physics_process), and are also set to hidden.

However, I’m well aware that they are still “there”. I’m wondering how expensive their mere presence is. I’ve so far had a hard time really gauging this myself, so I’ve been wondering what more experienced Godot users think of this question.

Thanks.

[mac_deth]

You can easily check how they impact performance by running the game and then using the Debug Monitor in the editor. Just tab back to the Editor and under Debug pick Monitors. Tick the boxes in the list of the stuff you want to monitor, like memory usage, FPS, etc.